That flag queue is rather large from what I've been told recently. I have a flag waiting for quite some time as well. "Patience" is the answer I guess.
– BartJun 10 '14 at 22:58

1

The system isn't broken, but the "other" flag queue can be slow due to the size. Why didn't you vote to close the 2nd question instead fo flagging? Was it previously closed for another reason?
– psubsee2003Jun 10 '14 at 22:59

@psubsee2003 Because the answer needs to be removed as well. Instead of flagging the question and the answer separately, I flagged the question with a custom reason.
– MoosemanJun 10 '14 at 23:02

1

@Mooseman the answer isn't actively harmful. You only voted to close it 20 minutes ago. You should have voted to close before you did anything.
– psubsee2003Jun 10 '14 at 23:04

@psubsee2003 When I originally flagged it, IIRC, I was unable to cast a close vote on the question due to the accepted answer.
– MoosemanJun 10 '14 at 23:06

3

@Mooseman there is no restriction on voting to close because of an accepted answer
– psubsee2003Jun 10 '14 at 23:07

2 Answers
2

You're right - it is. The number of flags has grown considerably over the past few years, and while we've moved a big chunk of work away from moderators, there is still a lot of stuff that must be handled. To give you an idea of how this breaks down, here's a graph of flags by month excluding close, not an answer, and very low quality:

That's a whole lotta flags. I've broken out two classes that tend to chew up a lot of time:

Comment flags are plentiful, accounting for over half of all flags last month. Even though comments are generally considered "second-class citizens" on SO, moderators must still spend a tremendous amount of time tending to them. Sometimes, this is fast - delete or decline and move on. Other times, it is exceedingly tedious: long comment threads and thorny conversations make for lots of wasted time. It doesn't help that the UI for this is reallyawful.

Custom ("other") flags make up the single most common flag type (comment flags are lumped together in the graph, but there are 5 distinct types of comment flags). And they're among the most time-consuming to process: generally, when folks choose "other", it's because something unusual is happening, and unraveling the problem can take some effort. It doesn't help that all manner of different problems are lumped together under this one banner, meaning any moderator processing these flags is stuck constantly context-switching as they move from one to the next.

What we're doing to fix this

Over the past few months, Jarrod, Tim and I have been working on a couple of different angles here:

More powerful tools for filtering flags, so that similar "other" flags can be quickly processed. Currently being prototyped.

A streamlined UI for showing/handling comment flags (and other flags). Currently in development.

In the meantime

I've also enlisted a couple of employees to help "test" the pending changes, and hopefully burn through some of the backlog while we're at it. The moderators on Stack Overflow do an awful lot, but they're very nearly at-capacity, making it difficult to catch up when they get behind. When that happens, it's common for those of us at SE to step up and help shoulder some of the load - expect to see this decrease in the next few days.

"when folks choose 'other', it's because something unusual is happening" No, actually, over half of the time it's because they don't know how to identify situations that don't require human exception handling, and just assume everything has to be handled by us. Let's just say that I spend more time declining flags that I shouldn't be handling in the first place than finding things that I should.
– BoltClock♦Jun 11 '14 at 1:39

7

Still wondering if a "when should I use or not use mod-attention flags" FAQ would be helpful to those who are willing to learn. I don't know if I can write one without sounding deeply annoyed and jaded, however.
– BoltClock♦Jun 11 '14 at 1:59

3

@BoltClock Yes please, that FAQ will be helpful. e.g. I have 89 flags per day, and I tend to flag all the wrong things I come across. For users like me, a FAQ will definitely help us make better and more judicious use of the flags
– Infinite RecursionJun 11 '14 at 4:29

2

@BoltClock over half of the time it's because they don't know how to identify situations that don't require human exception handling - this exactly, there are far too many users using a custom flag and we don't need to be involved.
– Taryn♦Jun 11 '14 at 17:33

Nothing is broken, the moderator flag queue is very large at the moment, so items take time to handle.

Your first example is just an unfortunate side effect, but now that the bounty is done, you can vote to close.

Your second example should have been voted to close, not flagged. You could have flagged the answer separately since it sucked, but there is absolutely no reason to not to vote to close it first. In fact, because you flagged the question instead of voting to close the question, you did more "harm" to the site because you allowed the question to remain open. Had you voted to close the question originally, it probably would have been closed already as it would have been put into the close vote queue and the community would have closed it.